Former Bill Clinton troubleshooter Lanny Davis has taken up flacking duties for Royal Caribbean International, under fire for apparently allowing a drunk passenger to fall overboard....

Preston Burton, a onetime protégé of white-collar defense legend Plato Cacheris’s, has moved uptown. The West Virginia native has moved into the plush quarters of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, a white-shoe San Francisco firm that opened a Washington office in 1993. Cacheris, now at Trout Ca­cheris, is still the man to see if you’re a spy....

First-year-associate salaries at premier Washington law firms? The new standard is $135,000 a year—more for top law graduates who landed prestigious jobs as clerks for judges. Some Supreme Court clerks are hired for more than members of Congress make....

Alan Fisch, the intellectual-property whiz who was named one of Washington’s top 30 lawyers two years ago, has dumped local firm Howrey and joined the Washing­ton office of New York’s Kaye Scholer. He’s the latest in a list of Howrey defectors that includes top defense lawyer W. Neil Eggleston and now government-contracts heavyweight Karen Manos, who went to a rival firm along with clients Northrop, Lockheed, and Raytheon. Insiders say Howrey is reeling from the blows, but management at the elegant offices in the Warner Building—where the movie The Pelican Brief was filmed—don’t ac­knowledge a problem. In an explosion of candor, or anger, on leaving, Manos told Legal Times that Howrey was a “Third World country.”